National Service Programs Have Nothing To Do With Patriotism

Nothing like a “boot camp” or forced labor to bring back that good ol’-fashioned patriotism, says Joe Klein:

We have drifted a long way from civic rigor in this country. We’ve had a period of intense prosperity and intense immigration and intense growth of government programs for those in need, followed by an economic crash. We don’t know each other very well anymore, and it’s hard to trust people you don’t know. Throughout history, civilizations have built a common cause through coming-of-age rituals. But we don’t do that anymore. Maybe we should think about that. It could be something as simple as kids’ cleaning up their schools together, as Bob Quinn did–yes, Newt Gingrich was right about that–or it could be full-blown national service, including boot camp. But unless we start getting to know each other better, our chances of coming to a consensus about the important things we have to do together as a nation are going to be pretty slim.

The co-chairs of the Aspen Institute’s project to expand national service have an op-ed in Politico today calling for the same thing, though they say it wouldn’t have to be compulsory:

What we truly value, we institutionalize. To educate, we build universities. To cure, we build hospitals. To make citizens, we must facilitate the shared experiences that cultivate civic pride and responsibility.

This should mean a period of full-time national service as a rite of passage for every young American, ages 18 to 28. Such service could be military or civilian. Young adults could choose the Army or Peace Corps, Marine Corps or AmeriCorps, the Navy or VISTA. National service would be optional, but expected. Every college admissions officer or employer must start to ask, “Where did you serve?”

Hear that, young people? The Aspen Institute doesn’t think you’re patriotic enough, so they’d like you to lend your labor toward a great patriotic revitalization of nation and soul. And if you don’t want to, you should be relentlessly shamed and denied educational opportunities.

This idea crops up from time to time, and is occasionally endorsed in the pages of our biggest newspapers, mostly because it’s slightly less controversial than drafting young people into the military. John McCain had a memorable story in the Washington Monthly a month after 9/11—never waste a crisis, as they say—in which he more or less said he’d draft you if he could:

The decline of the citizen-soldier is not healthy for a democracy. While it is not currently politically practical to revive the draft, it is important to find better incentives and opportunities for more young Americans to choose service in the military, if not for a career, then at least for a limited period of time.

Most people don’t take reviving the draft or compulsory national service seriously because they’re terrible ideas, and the latter would almost certainly be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Their defenders all share a weak, shallow understanding of patriotism that is better described as something more idealistic, like nationalism. They would have a hard time making sense of Henry James’ great aphorism that “patriotism is like charity—it begins at home.” Our betters at the Aspen Institute and other defenders of national service say the public suffers from a sort of civic ennui. But contra David Brooks, this has less to do with a nation fragmenting along economic or cultural lines a la Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, and more with the fact that the civic institutions where meaningful participation is actually possible have been stripped of much of their significance. And not just in the sense that state and local governments have abrogated many of their roles upward, but also because the more mobile a society gets, the less those local affinities matter. As the pluralistic state declines, we’re left with a unitary one, forever in a state of becoming, toward which destiny the labor of young people is demanded.

In the absence of James-ian patriotism, having been replaced by the crude jingo type prone to starting wars, libertarianism may be the idea best equipped to push back. Consider a hypothetical debate between a progressive, a conservative, and a libertarian about reinstating the draft. The conservative is perhaps slightly reluctant about the idea but embraces it because he sees a means toward restoring patriotism and, after all, the price of freedom is compulsory military service. The liberal enthusiastically supports it because it will correct racial disparities in the ranks (as per Rep. Rangel’s nauseatingobsession). The libertarian says the draft is slavery.

21 Responses to National Service Programs Have Nothing To Do With Patriotism

Kinda brings to mind for some reason Robert Duval’s great line from Apocalypse Now – I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Maybe it’s that unmistakeable whiff of fascism I’m getting from the Washington owned punditry which evidently thinks its members would avoid the Front by favor of service in the Ministry of Information.

“But unless we start getting to know each other better, our chances of coming to a consensus about the important things we have to do together as a nation are going to be pretty slim.”

Good Lord.

It would be easier to “get to know each other better” and “come to a consensus about the important things” if there weren’t millions of strangers from alien cultures pouring into the country all the time, don’t you think? But then Mr. Klein would probably regard halting the mass infiltration of America by non-Americans as downright un-American, wouldn’t he …

Since there is so little democratic accountability remaining in governance, national service amounts to being forced to serve elitist policies which have little to do with benefiting most people.

When you have a massive secret surveillance carried out against almost everyone in the country, recording their every comment and voice communication, by a corporate/government alliance, then it’s the modern incarnation of Mussolini’s definition of fascism – not a cigarette paper’s thickness between government and corporate interests and power.

You don’t need to mount a massive secret spy operation against your own entire nation, unless you consider their interests are against your own and you fear them enough to consider them all threats to your power if they find out what you are really up to.

Forcing everyone to also be dominated and directly serve these interests is indicative of wanting to control the population overtly and force them into submission.

It’s too bad the Constitution is no protection after all.

I might add that poor “immigrants” aren’t the ones subverting the Bill of Rights; it is all by the most affluent and empowered of the country, mostly all native-born, although their remaining loyalty to anything “American” is exclusively the American dollar. But it’s useful to blame poor people instead and distract us from the real causes of our distress – in fact, these poor will be used to justify totalitarian incursions and anti-American requirements of all of us.

As the lead-in to his call for national service Left/liberal-leaning Joe Klein wrote:

“We have drifted a long way from civic rigor in this country. ”

Bwaaahhaaaahaaa.

While Joe’s Lefty/liberal friends go ape over any and every attempt to make sure that only qualified citizens are exercising the vote and only voting once?

While Joe’s Lefty/liberal friends (and others) are in the pandering midst of trying to essentially grand full pardons—with benefits!—to at least 11 million non-citizens? Who by definition are law-breakers who have made a mockery of our sovereignty?

While the Washington/New York class of either democratic or “compassionate” interventionists who are so hot to send other American’s kids into harm’s way probably have about .0000000000000001% of *their* kids in the military?

While that same class stands meekly mute as our national interests, blood and treasure for 45+ years now have been poured out into the sand all in the service of one particular small foreign country?

While Congress blatantly ducks its constitutional responsibility to be heard on issues of war and peace?

While Mr. Obama’s political appointee friends are using the IRS to harass Obama’s political opponents, an alleged high crime or misdemeanor that was alleged in the impeachment proceedings against Nixon?

While Congress after Congress, indistinguishable from a pig-pen of hogs, has spent us into bankruptcy and sure decline out of nothing more than crass individual re-election motives?

And yet … it’s *us* who need lessons in “civic rigor”? That … *we* would be the ones in the wrong in marching on Washington with pitchforks?

I guess so. Seems we’ve let our overlords down, folks, as they seem to be coming ever closer to Bertolt Brecht’s idea of them dissolving us and electing a new people.

Time to take our medicine. And no amnesties from that for us, you can be damned sure.

I recommend a close reading of the first several chapters of Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein. It will explain his vision of national service — with the right to vote being something to be earned — and will serve to help wash the bad taste (in both senses of the term) from your mouth should you have watched the movie of the same name.

Heinlein was no idealist, certainly nothing close to how his ideas were portrayed in the movie. He had a healthy dose of cynical realism in his storytelling. As follow up reading, I recommend his essays included in the collection Expanded Universe.

In his 1973 address to the graduating midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy, he gave this simple definition of patriotism (edited for confusing contextual references):

The next level in moral behavior … is that in which duty and loyalty are shown toward a group of your kind too large for an individual to know all of them. We have a name for that. It is called “patriotism.”

It’s called “The Pragmatics of Patriotism” and the above quote is from an excerpt found at Heinlein on Patriotism. I strongly recommend reading the entire excerpt.

That’s what one of these “cutting edge” ideas festival is pushing? National service?

Anyway, progressives don’t consider a military draft to be anything akin to slavery, e.g. in the American south. Crucial difference for them: the latter was PRIVATE slavery. Public “slavery” as the libertarian would like to think of it is actually just everyone working for everyone else for some agreed upon common good. It’s hardly personal enslavement to a terrible master and all his arbitrary needs.

The decline of the citizen-soldier is not healthy for a democracy. While it is not currently politically practical to revive the draft, it is important to find better incentives and opportunities for more young Americans to choose service in the military, if not for a career, then at least for a limited period of time. John McCain

He is right. We are moving toward a professional career military, at some disconnect from the body politic.

“The next level in moral behavior … is that in which duty and loyalty are shown toward a group of your kind…”

That could easily be the excuse of any gang member engaging in violence and theft against non-members.

Or any “my country right or wrong” types, regardless of country – or who it is run by and whom they actually serve.

That sort of exclusionary, aggressive patriotism is a lower level of moral behavior, not a higher one:

“The worst outcrop of herd life [is] the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in fours to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; unprotected spinal marrow was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism – how passionately I hate them! How vile and despicable war seems to me! I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business.”

The Draft might be unjust, but calling it slavery is a bit much. Soldiers are compensated with wages and benefits, and they ate bit physically abused. Mandatory service is limited to several years. Call it indentured servitude at most. Which is incidentally how many of our ancestors repaid their passage fees.

What is unjust is asking the same volunteer to return to a war zone four times, exponentially increasing Gus risk of amputation and PTSD and traumatic injury, while dismissing out of hand any suggestion of a return to the Draft.

Yes, I know. Our foreign policy is a large part of the problem there. On that count I’m on the same page as most of you.

But even leaving all of the above aside, I gained much from my military service. Patriotism was emphasized from day zero of course. But beyond the official instruction was a practical education in the subject. I met men and women from every walk of life and learned how much we all have in common despite our differences, and how much strength there is in this nation as a people. That and a couple of trips to Mesopotamia granted a certain social and spiritual humility I am hard pressed to explain to civilians. This sense of cynicism and division (left and right) rubs me the wrong way to put it mildly. Maybe national service is too expensive to be practical. Maybe it wouldn’t impart the same shared experience and patriotism as military service. I don’t know. But don’t discount the cost of such a tiny percentage of the populace serving in the military.

The Draft was not “fascism” and neither is national civilian service. So many conservatives today crow about patriotism and yet seem oblivious to any of the responsibilities of being a member of our society. The next public service to be labeled as fascism will be jury service.

Look, taxes and jury service and the Draft are not much different from what many other countries require of their citizens — or much different from what the USA required during those times that conservative look to with nostalgia. A free country is not free from sacrifice, or service, or loyalty, or community, or cooperation.

This fear-mongering that any demand or requirement by out government is fascism is silly. It is also destructive of our society. All countries, from the beginning of time, have demanded SOMETHING of their citizens or subjects. In fact, when government demands nothing at all there is no real government, no real country and nothing worth living for much less dying for.

The Greatest Generation responded to the requests and event the demands of their country. Their self-sacrifice and patriotism are what brought our country to its peak of greatness.

The Draft did not fail America and the Press did not fail America; rather, our politicians failed America in Vietnam (an unnecessary war) and the American people, touched more or less equally by the Draft, called that war to a much-delayed halt. Those who would engage in unnecessary and disastrous wars were glad to end the Draft because the professional soldier class — but not the officers — could scarcely complain about being engaged: They were volunteers, after all!

The best obstacle to unnecessary wars IS a Draft. No democratic citizenry, touched more or less equally by a fair Draft with drastically limited exemptions, will put up with endless, pointless and self-destructive military adventurism.

When the people of America are ALL committed to the advancement of our country and the common good, and equally affected by and involved in that, we will rise together and not merely a few percent of our population of a certain class.

It should not require noting that most post-WWII military engagements of the USA — and ALL of those which did not involve real coalitions of many committed allied countries — have been destructive to our society (with increased drug use, PTSD, maimed manpower) and ultimately unnecessary. It should not require noting, but it does: Americans are ignorant of what led to Vietnam, why it was avoidable and unnecessary, and how much military and “black operations” have created blow-back harmful to the US.

Too few Americans know the US hypocritcally overthrew the democratically-elected leadership of Iran in 1953. For that, we got our own dictator in Iran, friendly to the US for 26 years. But now, Iran has been hostile tot he US for longer than 26 years and we see little evidence that will slack off soon. The rash actions of the US led to the Ayatollah Khomenei. Had we supported the democratically-elected leader of Iran in 1953, the US would be universally admired in Iran.

In Afghanistan, our bold and petty (yes, PETTY) attempt to give Russia its own Vietnam led directly to the Taliban and al-Qaida. We have always had more in common with the USSR and Russia than we ever had with Afghanistan. If the USSR/Russia had prevailed in Afghanistan, that country would be MORE secular, LESS fundamentalist, MORE prosperous, LESS opium-exporting (Russia was its main market) and al-Qaida might never have decided to make the US a target.

On the other hand, it was President Eisenhower who made Egypt less militant against the US. How? By NOT supporting UK/French/Israeli intervention in Egypt in 1956. That is why Egypt is not sworn to revenge and action against us. That is why the US could buy the peace between Israel and Egypt that lasts to this day.

It is time to play the long game and not the short game — always applying military and subversive efforts to gain a short-term advantage at the expense of our long-term interests.

Sorry, Fran, but I saw you palm that card. Seriously, though, you perpetrate a non sequitur by cherry-picking my quote and leaving out the key qualification:

Heinlein:
“The next level in moral behavior … is that in which duty and loyalty are shown toward a group of your kind too large for an individual to know all of them.”

There is zero connection between that and gang behavior. They employ xenophobia with a will where they could be “knowing” their rivals with minimal effort. Therein lies the dramatic tension that works so very well in “Romeo and Juliet”.

Your next point is about jingoism, which has no connection to patriotism beyond superficial markers all of which point out the fallacy of lumping jingoism under patriotism.

From a solely personal and subjective point of view, Einstein was traumatized by being a Jew in Germany* during the Third Reich. Taken in that context, no sane person would disagree with him. However, that very context negates his statement at an abstract level. The US had parades of soldiers marching to music, and we look upon that as an effective attempt to build morale amongst both the soldiers and the loved ones they are fighting to defend.

*My mother was Jew in Croatia until her family fled in 1940. My knowledge of all that is of course vicarious, but it permits me a very strong sympathy with Einstein’s thoughts without forcing me to validate them beyond his own experience.

William F. Buckley would have disagreed. See his 1990 book, Gratitude.

We aren’t going to get a draft or mandatory national service in the foreseeable future, but I wonder, if we’d kept national service all along, or if we’d been able to reinstate it a generation ago, would we be undergoing all these moronic culture wars today?

If people from California and Alabama, Oklahoma and Massachusetts had to mix for one or two years in adolescence would the country be as divided as it is now?

Would the rhetoric about cultural divides, economic inequality, social divisions, and the left behind sting as much if we’d mingled with each other for a few years of our lives?

Could our attitudes about politics be a little more humane and reasonable if we knew more people on the other side and couldn’t so easily reduce them to caricatures?

The first question to ask is why we need any kind of common purpose or cause to begin with? I see nothing wrong with a society comprised of individuals who just want to be left alone to their their own lives and pursue their own dreams free from the interference of others.

There is a historical word that describes phrases such as “common purpose” or “common cause”. That word is “fascism”.

“Welcome back from your 5 years of forced servitude. Oh, that entry level IT job we promised? The one that would pay $18/hr and have the chance at advancement? Oh yeah, we gave it to some Indian dude who’d do it for $12.”

Abelard Lindsey: By your “definition” every man who was a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, and every duly designated delegate to the Constitutional Convention, were fascists to their core. Clearly, only fascists would conspire to establish and fund national defense, oversight of interstate and international commerce, and an independent judicial system.